Punk Rock Bowling is one of the most exciting and unique music festivals running. This year, which happens to be their twentieth, is also one of their biggest! In addition to headliners NOFX, Rise Against, and At the Drive-In, we’ve got some rare visits to the US from legends including Norway’s Turbonegro and Canada’s DOA, not to mention too many other bands to even begin listing here.
Spinning Platters had a chance to pull founder Mark Stern from his busy schedule to talk about what it’s like to book a festival, which combines punk rock and bowling, and plop it in the middle of the desert at the beginning of summer. Lineup and tickets can still be found here!
Spinning Platters: Wait, a coffee table book about the history of Punk Rock Bowling?
Mark from Punk Rock Bowling: Yeah, it’s our 20-year anniversary, so we’re gonna do a limited run. Shepard Fairey did the front cover for us, and it’s coming out pretty nice. Lots of photos and art, telling the story of the whole thing and how it started.
SP: Nice, is it going to be available online, or are you going to need to go to the event to buy it?
MPRB: We’re doing a short run on it. We hope to just sell it all out, and that will be that.
SP: About how many copies do you think you’re going to do?
MPRB: I think we’re doing 2000–2500, around there.
SP: Awesome. Well that brings us to the beginning20 years you’ve been doing this. What was the impetus for starting a bowling competition with bands?
MPRB: Well, we were running our label, BYO Records. It was kind of just a thing where we heard that our friend Pat was doing something up in San Francisco. The Salt Lake guys that worked at BYO Bowl thought, “Hey, we should do a little party here.” We were using a bowling alley down in Santa Monica. We hit up all the labels, like Hopeless and Epitaph. Everyone was into it. We had probably 20 teams—some bands, some labels.
It turned into a weekly thing. They were all looking forward to it. It was growing. More people would come down and hang out.
Then we hit up everyone in San Francisco, said, “Hey, let’s bring this to Vegas, bring your teams down, and we’ll do a tournament there.” And they were into it, so that’s how we ended up in Vegas.
You know: We didn’t think it was going to turn in to anything. We just had the bowling tournament. Then, because we’re all in music, it was like, let’s have a show.
Actually, that first year, the only show we had was—the first year was at the Gold Coast, like 65 lanes? I think we had like 28 teams, total, so we took up half the bowling alley. Then we had an award party after. So two days of bowling—everyone stayed at the Gold Coast.
It was just a big party. Then we had our awards party. If it wasn’t the Me First and the Gimme Gimmes’s first show, it was one of the first, and we did this at the Double Down, which is a little dive bar in Vegas, near the airport. 200 people trying to cram in there, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes and one of their early shows.
So yeah everyone had a great time. Then the next year all these other labels found out about it, they wanted to get in, and we sold out all of our lanes!
SP: Crazy.
MPRB: Yeah, so it just kept growing. We ran out of lanes, so we’d sign people up on a waiting list, and give teams a deadline. You had to sign up by a certain time, or it’d go to the waiting list, and we grew like that.
We eventually ended up with squads. So the first day, everybody bowls. Then the top, like, 16 would go to the playoffs the next day, until you reached the championship. Then we started doing two squads: one at noon and one at three. Then it turned into three squads and just kept growing.
We were doing it around Presidents’ Day, so like February? So it was cold. But everyone was staying in the same place, there’s nowhere to go. After that, we moved around, we went downtown to this placed called the Castaways for a little bit, and from that, ended up in Sam’s Town for four years, and that’s in Henderson. So it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, you don’t really have any place to go. You’ve got 300-400 people, hanging out in the bowling alley, in the casino. So as it was getting bigger, everyone around town is doing shows in clubs, and people started going out to these clubs, and we were thinking, man we should really be doing more shows. We were doing a Friday kick-off show, where the bowlers would get in for free, then the Sunday award party. That was about it. We were limited by the cold weather, you know? So, from Sam’s Town, we went to this place called Sunset Station, which was also in Henderson, a little further out. They had this whole outdoor amphitheater with grass and everything, right by where the pool was. So we decided to move it to May, and that was our first year of the festival, 2010. So from 1999-2009, we were scrambling for venues every year, sometimes we’d do House of Blues shows, or rent a hall. There was an old punk place called the Huntridge Theatre, we used that a few times, but they closed that down. So every year was a challenge. But anyway, 2010 happened, and the first two days we sold out, and the third day was close, but they didn’t really want to have us back, so we went downtown. There’s all these clubs that have opened up, and we can just rent a lot. So we’ve been down there ever since, just growing. We move the lot every year, every few years. So, yeah. That’s kind of how the whole story goes (laughs).
SP: So outdoors in Las Vegas is tough, how did you find the right time of year to do something outdoors?
MPRB: Well you never really know how it’s gonna be. A few years ago, we had Refused – it rained. You just never really know. We’re usually more worried about wind, especially in Henderson, it’s kind of a wind tunnel. So I don’t know, we get lucky with Memorial Day. We like to have it on a holiday weekend, but that has a couple challenges. It’s more expensive for people to get there, which kinda blows. The hotels usually are charging more, but we can get rooms at a good rate, people can book through us, but those are sold out, so. It’s nice to have the three days for the festival, usually like 80% of the people stay through Tuesday, so they’re there for the whole festival. But, the weather. You know, we looked at the reports over the years, but it fluctuates because it’s the desert, so you never know what you’re gonna get.
SP: Well I will pray things are cool for you. A couple questions about line-up, how do you decide who you’re going to reach out to, to get their acts back together for this thing? This year, you have Turbonegro’s first gig in the United States in a long time. In past years, you’ve managed to get Iggy’s solo band from the 80’s back up. How do you-?
MPRB: Well, a lot of these bands I’m working on for years – Iggy Pop, I had talked to him directly, and he got it. Sometimes, especially with big bands like that, if you can get right to a person, and convince them that it’s a cool thing, they can go to the people that work for them and say they want to do it, and we can work something out. When you’re cold-calling, especially as a punk festival, a lot of agents blow you off. I think it’s gotten easier, but it’s still a challenge. There’s so many festivals now, a lot of bigger festivals too, and they’re over-paying bands, and you get priced out. So a lot of it – you talk to bands. I’ve been talking to Partisans, trying to get them out, for five years. They haven’t been here in, I don’t know, 15-20 years. Or The Marked Men, same thing. They never play, I hit them up every year. So even for next year, I’m already working on it. We try not to repeat, too. So we have these lists of bands we haven’t had, or if we’ve had them, it’s been three years, so we’re not redundant. That’s hard. We have the festival, and we’re also doing all these club shows, it ends up being like 120 bands. So we just have a wishlist, and when things fall through, we always have back-ups. This year we branched out a little bit: At The Drive-In, Rise Against. Never had either of those bands. It’s a little different for us, but I think it’s within the scope, and they’re both awesome live. I saw At The Drive-In, it was amazing. They’ve been around forever, and I like that we can mix it up, we had Devo one year, and people were like, what’s Devo doing at a punk rock festival, you know? But like, Devo’s the most punk band you’ll ever see.
SP: Yeah, Devo and the Ramones were my first introductions to punk. Well, Devo, the Ramones, and the Go-Gos.
MPRB: Oh yeah, I used to play with the Go-Gos all the time. That’s the thing, it was a diverse scene when it started – that’s what it was. Everything was different, it wasn’t like, this band sounds like that band. Everyone had their own sound, and it was about being innovative, artistic. We try to bring that to the festival.
SP: Speaking of diversity, first I have to commend you for having one of the rare festival line-ups that are kind of diverse. You have two female-fronted bands in your second line, and the trans-fronted Against Me, but when you get to the lower half of the line-up, it’s pretty guy-heavy.
MPRB: It is. It’s not intentional, we search out and try to get more women-fronted bands, but also to not repeat too much, it’s a challenge.
SP: What do you think you could do, to up the representation. When you have so many guy bands out there, how do you elevate the women?
MPRB: Well, I guess I keep a running list, whenever I see a band, or hear a band, I keep track of that, and if there’s women in it, kinda highlight that. But you know, just because there’s women in a band – if they’re not that good, it’s not gonna make me want to book them. But also, if they’re really good and have no draw, that makes me interested, you know? We like to find cool bands that are great, that should get some exposure. That’s kind of how we fill up the bottom.
SP: Cool so tell me about the Svetlanas, who are one of your opening acts?
MPRB: Yeah, that was last-minute, she’s friends with my brother’s girlfriend, she’s from Italy. They were out on a tour that was a disaster, and I guess they were cooking food and stuff, and it came up that they would come out here. So I was like, well I have this spot, and it’s yours. I feel bad sometimes, it’s a lot of money for them to come out, and like, all I can give them is a spot, sometimes I feel like it’s a challenge, when we don’t have a lot of budget for a slot, and the band has to go out-of-pocket to get here. I try to accommodate that, but it’s tough. So, they were into it, just road warriors.
SP: I’m realizing, your prices are really good – $50 a day, is not something you see for travelling festivals, at all.
MPRB: Yeah, it’s tough, you know. You try to get sponsors to help out, so you don’t have to put it all on the ticket. That’s always been a challenge, we try to keep everything as cheap as we possibly can. Drinks at the festival – you’ve got $6 beers, which is unheard.
SP: Yeah, that’s incredible.
MPRB: Yeah, and then imports it’s $7-8, premium liquors. People I know who do festivals are like, you’re crazy, you should be charging more. But I think, like, these people are staying here for three days, you know? I have to respect that. They need food and drinks over a three-day period, and I could price-gouge on them, but then they won’t have anything left by the third day. And we are involved in all of that, food vendors and everything. We make sure to have a lot of vegan, and vegetarian options. When I go to festivals, and I can’t eat anything, or the drinks are overpriced, and there’s 300 bands, but there’s five stages, so you can really only see ten (laughs), you know? I don’t want to pay for 300 bands. So we kind of look at that, and put it all together.
SP: I love that it’s all one – there’s no overlap, is there?
MPRB: No, I mean, only on the club shows, and with that, we approach it – if you’re buying a ticket to the club, you’re gonna go see that show, whereas if you buy a wristband, you’re gonna be standing on line for the show everyone wants to go to, or standing on line for five hours for a shirt. So you can’t get in, but you spent a ton of money on a wristband. So not really a fan of that. We usually have a mad scramble when we put the club tickets on sale, but this year we did something totally different. If you’re going to the festival, you get your three-day pass, then we have pre-sale access codes we give you. So it rewards people who are gonna be there the whole weekend supporting us. That’s what important. Without the festival doing well, we can’t do all these club shows. We can’t just dump the festival and do the club shows, they help pay for each other.
SP: That makes a lot of sense. One last question for you, who is on your wishlist? Who have you not been able to get, but would love to see at the fest?
MPRB: Stranglers, I’ve been trying to get for years, thought we were gonna get them the last two years, I love em. Another band I’ve been wanting to get, Violent Femmes. Hasn’t worked out, I think one of the guys lives in Tasmania? So I have to catch them when they’re on a little run, as opposed to them coming for the one show.
SP: NOFX are one of those bands that play a lot of things, so people think they’re playing everything.
MPRB: Exactly. And when you’re dealing with bands that are on reunions, that are older. You’ve got to check them out, make sure they still bring it. There’s a lot that don’t, and people will be like, well why don’t you get this band, or that band? And it’s like, the name on the poster will look great, but I don’t feel like it’s fair to book a band that’s just not that good anymore. Just because they have a name, I don’t think it’s good for the audience.
SP: (Laughs) Thank you for that.
MPRB: Yeah, you know, we’re music fans. That’s how we look at everything. Like if I’m going to this festival, how do I want to be treated? And that’s how we lay everything out.
